This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Friday, September 6, 2013

There is a great new popular culture archive devoted to television, radio and film now available for free online. It is called the Media History Digital Libraryand it features American content, mainly from the early-to-late 20th century.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

You may recall this post and this post, in which I described a great Web comic that is a perfect example of Millennial retro-futuristic style. The cartoonist, David O'Connell, combines steampunk-ish early-modern-to-nineteenth-century costumes and imagery with futuristic tropes. He sets his hero's story in a world that looks like a cross between Renaissance Venice, the fin-de-siècle Ottoman empire, and 1970s' sci-fiction, all at the same time. One minute, the characters have Elizabethan lace collars, the next minute they are interacting with Star-Wars-type robots. It's just great. O'Connell finished his first odyssey with this character, Tozo the Public Servant, in 2012. Yesterday, after a long hiatus, he started a new story, Tozo - Empire of the Spider (see the beginning here).

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Telegraphposted photoshopped artworks designed to show how five major historical figures would look today: "The artworks, which took three months to create, were created under the
watchful eye of award-winning academic, author and historian Dr Suzannah
Lipscomb to ensure the new artworks accurately reflect how the
historical figures might look in 2013." (Hat tip: Curious Portraits of Dead Elizabethans via -C. Also posted at Gizmodo and elsewhere.) All images are from The Telegraph. The selection includes an adaptation of the disputed Cobbe portrait of the young Shakespeare. This is one example among many of how technology has changed our awareness of the past and made it plastic and anachronistic.

BBCreported this summer on an artist who creates portraits from DNA traces found on found objects. Beyond a Millennial artistic statement that is a weird interface of the scientific and transcendent, Heather Dewey-Hagborg aims to make the public aware of how much information really is there:

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist who creates portraits of strangers based on DNA extracted from random rubbish. The project is meant to raise awareness of genetic surveillance, Dewey-Hagborg says. "We should be concerned because we don't know, yet, how our DNA might be used against us in the future," she says. Genetic artefacts such as cigarette butts and chewing gum
yield enough DNA to determine one's ancestry, eye colour, and whether or
not the person has a tendency to be overweight.

While Dewey-Hagborg argues that she is not invading people's privacy
and there is 'no way you could recognize someone' from her DNA
reconstructions, two possible outcomes from her work immediately spring
to mind.

One is the potential for criminal police investigations. The
other is that we can trace the actual impact of external life upon our
genetic heritage by observing the gap between the DNA reconstruction and
the appearance of the real person. The DNA reconstruction provides an
image of each person's basic 'blueprint.' The real person presents the
'blueprint' plus the impact of real life. That gap, between 'nature and nurture,' is something that has been the core of (often disturbing) debates in Darwinism versus Social Darwinism, left-right
politics, political philosophy, and anthropological analyses since the 19th century.

the concept of inductive bias, an inextricable component in the framework of intelligent computer systems. ... [T]his bias represents an abstract danger which could
have very real social and political consequences. ... [M]y recent art projects [also] experiment with taking the apparatus of
surveillance technology and re-purposing its mechanisms for the
intention of play rather than the reinforcement of power.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg: Her DNA-Reconstructed-Self-Portrait and the artist In Real Life. Image Source: Design Boom.

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.